


Be All My Sins Forgotten (but, perhaps, never quite forgiven)

by rufeepeach



Category: The Borgias
Genre: F/M, Incest, sex over a dead body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-11
Updated: 2013-06-11
Packaged: 2017-12-14 16:53:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/839168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alfonso is dead, and Lucrezia lies beside him, empty and willing herself into nothingness. Only Cesare is there, bathing the blood from her skin, and she is too far gone and lost to resist one last sin, even when she knows it must be the last, even when she knows that God is no longer in the room with them, and all there is is nothingness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be All My Sins Forgotten (but, perhaps, never quite forgiven)

**Author's Note:**

> So Val and I watched the series finale, and I saw this whole scene playing out from the ending onward. It is, to date, the sickest and wrongest thing I've ever written. And I am absurdly proud of it.

Nothing.

Lucrezia’s world has been reduced to that one word, chanted like the prayers she still clings to, the mantras of Cesare’s soldiers, the rumours that sweep every corner of the city, the state, the world itself. Nothing, nothing, nothing. 

Nothing heard, felt, or seen. Lucrezia Borgia knows nothing, and so she has no need to breathe, or to speak, or to move. Nothing. Blissful, empty, nothing.

If she breathes, then she accepts that Alfonso does not. If she speaks, then she can hear her brother’s own words, the whispered repetition of ‘safe’ and ‘clean’, ‘naked’, ‘bloodless’, and that blistering, terrible, beautiful ‘mine’. If she moves, then she cranes into the gentle sweep of his cold, clean cloth as it wipes away her poor, sweet, dead husband’s blood. She allows herself to enjoy this nothing, the moment of cleansing, the ritual and rite and horribly erotic act of one murderer washing away the sin of the other.

She is a widow twice over, she thinks, and both gone at the hands of her brother. The same brother who now bathes her, gently, the cloth in his hand soon red with Alfonso’s blood, where it stains her face, her neck, the pads and backs of her fingers. His mouth follows the cloth, lapping and scraping at her throat as if he’d draw her own blood to the surface, swallow it down into himself. Cesare is a monster, she thinks, and what would be one more cardinal sin to add to his litany?

Alfonso’s blood will never leave her hands. She’d have Juan’s and Giovanni’s on them too, if Cesare had not done such tidy jobs on them both. And didn’t he kill them both on her word, as vengeance for her hurts and her tears, also? What makes her any more innocent, any less a murderess, than he is a guilty, rotten murderer?

He is the snake in the Garden of Eden, but if so then their tails are entwined together. She is not Eve, tempted and fallen: she is a Borgia, born rotten to her core.

His cloth has reached her bodice, and those hands, those hands that are clean now but never will be again, not really, not ever, are on the stays. But Lucrezia is nothing, nothing at all, not body nor soul nor mind. And, therefore, God cannot see her, how she lies like a sacrifice next to the body of her husband, and allows her own brother, the man who widowed her once more, to disrobe her. She does not help, but she does not hinder either.

She is nothing, she thinks, because innocence is too far out of reach now to contemplate. Because as Alfonso’s body cools, Lucrezia’s warms, and her very skin heats with traitorous blood, as hot as his is cold, carrying something too desperate and raw to be desire, but that throbs just the same. 

The cloth moves over the swell of her breasts, despite there being no bloodstains on the skin there, and she shivers. Lucrezia is nothing, but her body is flesh, the same as it always was, always will be. And flesh heats and shivers and wants, even as the soul lies stunned and the mind closes down. Flesh and heart and blood, and why would God care if those are heated even now, and by whom, and at what time, if the eternal soul is all that He cares for? What is Lucrezia’s body now, when her soul is so very far gone and lost?

Her bodice is unlaced, spread out and cast aside. After a moment, silent but for the heavy, wanting breathing that proves she still lives on, her skirts are gone too, and with them her bodice and pantaloons. His hands are tender, achingly so, and swift, and skillful, as if this were his highest purpose, the moment he was born for. She has long felt that she and Cesare were born to be together, bonded and bound, his body carved to fit her own. But what would it mean, if he were truly born for this moment? 

When he became so adept at the undressing of still, silent women Lucrezia does not know, but it is not a God-given skill. This is not a blessed moment, God is not in this room with them, and nothing is natural or good. Everything here is tainted, and there is no one, God nor Satan, here to witness. The only demon Lucrezia sees is the one leaning over her, with tender patience and soul-deep adoration in his eyes, bathing her as a supplicant would his Goddess. 

He watches her if she is a work of the finest art, the Madonna, the centre of the universe, everything and eternity, and no, no she is not. She is nothing but a guilty widow, drenched in her innocent husband’s blood; an adulteress, a traitor, a woman so far fallen from God that she can barely see the sky anymore.

Under Cesare’s steady, skillful hands, Lucrezia is stripped bare but for her shift and stockings. The wet, cool cloth is everywhere, washing every inch of her fragile skin, as if she had bathed in instead of simply spilt poor, dear Alfonso’s blood. Her skin is pale, clean and pink in its wake, but the blood remains. Perhaps someday she can fade it, make some amends, but she feels like a stab wound to the chest that it will not be Cesare’s hands that guide her there. A demon cannot open the gates of Heaven, after all.

She would have gloried in this, in the blood and the ending of all, were the body beside her Giovanni Sforza’s, and the blood that of her monstrous first husband. There would be none of his emptiness, this craving for nothing, nothing at all, were it he who Cesare had stabbed and Lucrezia herself poisoned. She’d have killed him herself, she knows, and even now would have felt no shame in it.

But Alfonso, dear Alfonso, who had had no ambition, no burning desire for power or wealth or even the wine she drove him to, who had wanted only and simply the pretty, smiling girl he’d courted in the Vatican Gardens to love him back, is the body beside her. His soul is in Heaven, now, and Lucrezia knows for fact that she will plague him no longer, even when she too lies as cold as he. Her father saw it himself, when he was on the very precipice of death, did he not? Heaven does not wait for Borgias, only nothing, that aching and terrible, Godless nothing.

But Lucrezia can cope with nothing; right now, she even craves it.

Perhaps nothingness is the best peace that can be offered, for a family that breeds demons like a sewer breeds rats. It has to be better, safer, cleaner, than the erotic torture, the delicious, hellfire torment, of Cesare kissing her lips and sweeping cold fire over her breasts, stomach, lower.

Cesare’s cloth stills, at last, and she is trembling in its wake. Its cool, soothing graces are replaced in full by something altogether hotter and wetter: his mouth, kissing and laving at her skin. He cleans her now not like a nurse or a brother, had he ever tried for such innocence, but with his very breath, his lips and tongue, himself, like a mother cat to her kitten, like a Baptist to a sinner, like a lover praying at the altar of his beloved’s body. 

And so Lucrezia writhes, arches, gasps, little movements that are all body and no mind, and allows that mouth to go from where his fingers caress her neck, down her shoulder, across her breastbone. She gasps when it laps at the peaked tips through her chemise, elevated from pain and blood by gentle licks and the solid pressure of his hand at her throat. He will hold her down, to the bed and to the earth, to him. If he falls, she will fall with him.

She was not destined to fall, she thinks, once. Once she had been a gentle girl, blonde like sunlight and smiling like the cherubs of the Vatican walls, innocent in thought, word, deed, desire. She’d once blamed Giovanni for robbing her of that. She’d thought his loss would end her descent; she’d thought it would allow her to regain the light he’d smothered.

But then she found Paolo, her sweet Paolo, strung up in the town square, like a traitor or a common cutthroat, and Juan had smiled his reptilian smile, and she’d known. She’d known that she’d kill her brother, her own kith and kin, there and then for what he’d done. And how could she blame a man who’d already found his comeuppance for that? For the cruelty that was apparently her birthright, the Borgia inheritance of ruthlessness and bloodied hands.

Alfonso married a dead woman, Lucrezia thinks, as Cesare takes his blade – his bloody, stained blade, her husband’s blood, and now it rips apart the stays of her chemise and bares her skin to his eyes and mouth – and removes the last of her clothing. Alfonso had loved the girl who lived and loved and died with her Narcissus, the Echo who still haunted the dark, dangerous, complicated realm Lucrezia became in her mourning. And it had been that Echo who loved him, the girl who spoke of seahorses and open sky, rather than politics and poison. He had loved a last, final, melancholic Echo, and married Medusa in her place, and now his skin is cold stone on the bed beside her.

She killed him, as surely as Cesare did.

Cesare’s mouth finally finds hers, and she at last kisses him back desperately, her hands finally moving, finally action, finally alive. Everything is motion now, the desire to run far and fast from that horrid realization, the blame and accusation and terrible, grinding guilt. She loses herself in that kiss, in arching and moaning at his touch, sparking on her skin. At how his tongue bathes even her mouth, her lips, lapping the words of shame and fear from them as if he alone could restore her. 

He bathed her and now her skin is naked and clean and wrapped around his leathers, her core drenched and pressed against him. What started with a promise of future retribution, with a dead Moor, with a rapist in her marriage bed and a stable boy in the forest; what deepened with escapes and accusations and with blood and manipulation, with an innocent boy strung up in the streets and her brother’s loathsome body floating in the Tiber… and then another marriage bed, another boy who was not her husband, a sin she’ll never confess and never repent… all of it ends here tonight.

Cesare killed Alfonso in cold blood; he would have had him killed were it his blade or an assassin’s who did the deed. And now her serpentine, traitorous, trembling body caresses, kisses, adores that same brother. The second brother to kill an innocent she’d loved; the second brother to make her burn with hatred, wish him dead.

She’ll never wish her Cesare dead again, she swears, but this moment, when his hungry mouth kisses her and his hands claim her, when his body struggles to enter her, yes. At this moment she hates him. She hates him as she hated Giovanni who ruined her, and Juan who betrayed her, and her father who couldn’t save her. 

She hates him as she hates every man who brought her here, who made her the tarnished, bloodied blade she is: the broken whore of Rome, who gasps for her own brother as he teases one breast and suckles the other.

His hand slips between her legs, and strokes at the aching, tender, wet flesh there. He knows her like an extension of himself, plays her broken body like an instrument, plucking and teasing moans and cries from her bruised lips, and where is God now? Where is the unity, the sanctuary, the Heaven she used to find with Cesare’s body covering hers? 

God is no longer in the room with them: all they are are the Borgia siblings, the demon and his soulmate, and Lucrezia cannot find her peace with that, not anymore.

There is pleasure, of course, deep and intense and stoked from embers into fire, and she arches and trembles with it, desperate beyond belief, beyond reason or thought. His lips now flutter at her neck, his teeth scraping lightly right where he knows will melt her bones and close her eyes. There is love, as well, the great and terrible love she knows will never truly die. She could hate him with the power of God’s own thunder, and yet her heart would still rest in his sullied, bloodied hands. Just as she can feel his beat beneath her own chest, safe and warm and wretched with her own.

“Please,” she gasps; it is the only word that means no more than what it says. ‘Yes’ would mean an acceptance; his name acknowledgement of the sin they commit; and a profession of true love would be a lie she will not whisper, even here. She begs because begging is the realm of the desperate, and that feeling alone stands as truth, where every other word on her lips is half a lie. 

But then nothing about this is true, and what sinful pleasure is ever denied in this Rome they have created? This Rome where poison flows like water through the Tiber, and cardinal sins are swallowed and stomached like communion wine?

“I can deny you nothing, sis,” he promises, lies, and Lucrezia knows, there and then, that while this is a moment – where he frees himself and parts her trembling, white legs, and slips inside as if he were born a part of her own body – of physical and joyous union, the truth is separation. They are no longer united, bound by impossible love, by sins carved into the dead of night, by a terrible desire shared and finally, wonderfully slaked. He is at last inside her, breathing her breath, kissing her skin, sharing her body and her pleasure. But for the first time since they were children, Lucrezia feels the rift between them, the great chasm which separates damned brother from broken sister.

She cannot lie to him here, not with Alfonso dead at their hands, and her heart still and dead in her chest, and the whole world shattered. She cannot look him in the eye, not with her poor, innocent husband’s blood on their hands. But he can. He can lie and say he’ll deny her nothing; he can look into her eyes without shame. Even knowing the utter truth of all of their sins, he never looks away.

A crime of passion Lucrezia could have forgiven – and, truly, what name else could this sin they commit now, a brother thrusting and arching inside his sister, and both moaning with pleasure? – but this was murder. This was cold, calculated and cruel. The act itself, the moment, she believes an accident. But even her father, her dear misguided father, knew the intention was there one way or the other.

All her poor husband had ever done was love her and indulge her, and long for wife and freedom and children. He committed no crime she did not force him to, and now he is dead beside her, their arms still touching slightly, and it is his rival, his killer, his bitter enemy, who fucks his wife over his cold body.

But Lucrezia is nothing, not her writhing body nor her twisted mind. Lucrezia Borgia, this night, lies dead with her husband. She wishes she had had the bravery to do as she’d intended, and drink the last of the poison her Alfonso had downed to end his life.

Instead she had simply slept, and awoken to kisses to her cheeks and brow, the same fevered lips that now plunder her own mouth. The pleasure of his thrusts, his teasing, his very skin against hers, builds and mounts within her, and thought stutters to a halt. All Lucrezia can do is feel, and all she can feel is pleasure as Cesare thrusts inside her, his hands caress her, and his lips pillage and burn her. She is Italy, open to his claim and his torment. She is not his sister, his love, his home, not anymore. She is naught but another object for him to love, to hold too tightly onto, and to lose.

Like Ursula, so long ago, like their family, and like, she thinks, Italy itself. She sees her poor brother’s fate laid out like a carpet before her, and did she not loathe him as deeply now as she’ll always love him, she’d weep.

She cants her hips desperately, driving out that feeling, the sense of being a thousand miles beneath the ocean while he stands on dry land. She has never felt so alone in all her life, even with the man she has loved since birth buried within her, even with her whole body striving for release. He can set her free, she thinks, with the sparks at his fingertips and his words in her ear, sweet meaningless nothings and promises he’ll never keep, not even to her. If she can hold this moment, this peaking moment, where she is so close to coming and so far from anything else, then everything will be all right.

But then his thumb flicks that nub between her legs, and the ecstasy peaks with a strangled cry, and wanes slowly, causing every limb to tremble and settle, her body to clench and release, her soul to slip free from its shocked bindings and re-inhabit her body.

Alfonso is dead, but she is not Cesare’s to claim either. Not as she was but an hour before, or yesterday, or a lifetime ago. Not anymore.

She has never been so alone in all her life, but it accompanies the nothingness, and the sense of soul-deep sin that must be, finally, purged.

He finds his own release, and groans and shakes in her arms, finally falling silent and still at her side. His face is buried in the crook of her neck, his hand still lightly grasping her throat. It is not comforting, anymore, not as it always has been. It is threatening, possessive, and she reaches up with one numb hand and removes it, sitting up quickly even as he falls to lie on his side.

“Lucrezia?” he asks, when he can speak, and when she looks at him she knows he can see the pain, the fury, the agony written all over her face. Let him see, she thinks, let him know what he caused. Let him see where his road will lead him too, someday.

“Goodnight, Cesare,” she says, coldly. She’d have called him ‘brother’ before, but that is no longer true. Now he is just the man she loves, the man she once called husband, the man she knows she must never hold again. Now he is the demon in her bed, the snake in the garden who will damn her forever if she allows it.

Her brother will go to Hell, she thinks, and swallows a sob. Perhaps he has already been given a damned principality there, as he has in Albret, as he has in claiming Forli and the Romagna. God smites those who revel and indulge in their wickedness worst of all, she thinks, is that not what the holy confession is for? To repent, to be punished accordingly, and to be made innocent as the lamb once more?

She should not have committed this sin with him, she thinks, just as she should not have poisoned and killed, nor learned her witchcraft in Naples, nor allowed Micheletto to kill the King in his own eel pond.

Just as she should have mourned Juan, and forgiven Giovanni, and honored her father.

There is the rift, Lucrezia thinks, as she looks down at her beautiful, damned brother; her fallen-angel brother, the Lucifer in her bed. She will repent and earn forgiveness for her sins, but he will never apologize again, and mean it with his whole heart. Her soul, perhaps, can still be saved: he has already promised his to Satan himself.

One tear falls down her cheek, and then another. Tears of grief, of mourning for another dead boy she loved, another life lost, another girl she’ll never be again. She misses terribly her innocent, sweetling brother in his Cardinal’s robes and his moral thought. The boy who’d thought of nothing but honour, nobility, and chivalric love. 

That this is what that boy became, the twisted, damned man who would find ultimate pleasure in bedding his own sister over her murdered husband’s bleeding body, fills her with as much grief as the sight of Alfonso’s staring, unseeing eyes.

“Don’t leave,” he says, his voice hushed, and he sits up on the bed. “Please.”

“Would you have me sleep beside the dead body of my husband, brother?” she spits the word, the word that now means ‘traitor’ and ‘monster’ and ‘murderer’, the word that unites Cesare and Juan once more and makes horrors of them both. “Would that prove your claim to me, once and for all?”

“He hurt you, sister,” Cesare says, and she stumbles on her way to find her robe, because even now, even after all of this, he still cannot understand. He is a demon indeed, she thinks, if he cannot see love, and murder, and grief and sin, when he sees them before him.

“I hurt him worse, and more times than even I can count,” she reminds him, finally finding her silk and velvet robe and slipping it around her shoulders. “And you were my accomplice.”

“He should have saved you from Naples-“

“No,” Lucrezia cuts him off, shakes her head, “No, I should have let him guide me, take me away from there to our lands, and live quietly. Just as mother should have lived with her goat farmer, and father should have stayed in Spain. Our family’s ambitions killed my husband, Cesare, just as they killed my brother.”

“Let me come with you,” he begs, and she could laugh to see it, cruel and sharp: the great and terrible Cesare Borgia, pleading with his powerless little sister to share her bed. “Please.”

“When I leave this room, brother, you are not to see me again,” she says, coldly. “Do not seek me out, do not come to my rooms, do not call me your sister again. If you love me at all, please, please let me leave you. Let me forget.”

Her hand rests on the door handle, and though she means every word she says with startling clarity, the final push is more than she can bear.

“You started this,” he reminds, angrily, as close to spite as he’ll come with her, of all people in the world. “You pushed this sin on us.”

“Sins can be repented,” she tells him, without turning. “But God will not forgive me, if I forgive you this. This was unrepentant murder, and of an innocent boy. Jealousy, ambition, and politics,” she spits, hating every word, every syllable, of the words that damn her whole family. She laughs, hard and cruel, “Give those up, brother, and then come and find me again.”

She uses every ounce of strength she has to push the doorknob down, and leaves without another glance, another word. He shouts her name but she is across the threshold, and does not answer.


End file.
